Financial Service Industry applications and new data center designs may require low latency and predictability (i.e., low jitter) in data communications. A traditional networking stack, e.g., TCP/IP, may provide good compatibility for socket-based applications but latency remains a challenging issue. An application may be configured to poll for received packets in order to reduce latency. Even with polling by the application, device interrupts and DPC (delayed procedure call) scheduling for each interrupt may occur when packet(s) are received since a network device driver is typically unaware of polling by the application and may not disable interrupts. Both interrupt context switching and DPCs introduce varying delays that may increase latency and/or increase latency variation (i.e., jitter).
Although the following Detailed Description will proceed with reference being made to illustrative embodiments, many alternatives, modifications, and variations thereof will be apparent to those skilled in the art.